The media was dominated with hopes for the discovery of the submersible piloted to visit ruins of the Titanic deep, deep underseas, the abyssal depths hardly scrutable. As we learn more and more about Stockton Rush’s marketing of dream voyages to the Titanic, in the ink spilled over a global tragedy that snared an international cast of unfortunates–a Pakistani billionaire and son duo celebrating Father’s Day on the doomed dive; a French marine scientist; a British adventurer tycoon who had previously blasted into space–it is clear the basic map for the journey on which he piloted the experimental craft was that of international waters–not only underseas, but “offshore,” beyond the constraining lines of national jurisdiction–as much as the ruin’s location on a volcanic reef. If the wreck of the transatlantic steamship liner boasted as impervious to the ocean elements has been found to be transformed to an ecosystem teeming with marine life, becoming a reef in its own right, the prospect of voyaging in person to the wreck assumed a global luster equal in the prestige of the exclusive luxury liner before it sunk in 1912.
The Titanic was an unprecedented ship, to be sure–a subject of awesomeness that challenged natural bounds in its own right. Did the Christening of the ship, whose sunken remains Stockton Rush had hoped to show the paying guests on his submersible, offer an echo of the “vast and Titanic features” that the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau look to for perpetual refreshment, the elusive wild whose sight offers “inexhaustible vigor” to viewers, from the features of “the sea-coast with its wreck, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks”? The sinking of the Titanic famously was a thunderbolt in global news, and the renewed capital of the Titanic’s wreckage as a soundstage in James Cameron’s successful (and quite costly, at nearly $300 million) film promoted the liner’s ruin as a tourist attraction–a dive to find the real experience at the bottom of the sea–drenched in romanticism and sentiment. But the economic base of the superstructure lay in the potential value of the submersible as a way to assist offshore companies to seek valuable deposits in the international waters that the late entrepreneur sought to offer–if the regulations he seems to have flouted seems to have suggested a sense of imperviousness that ignored the huge risks of underseas mapping, or of the unique risks that underwater mapping implies. I
Indeed, the sinking of the Titanic is often seen as a needless flouting of the precautions for ocean dangers that had been increasingly mapped by the late nineteenth century–as shipping increased, without much sense of a way of boosting security at sea. If the Shipping Forecast was sent out by telegraph from 1867 as a maritime service to secure safety at sea, the scope of meteorological dangers materialized as slow-moving storms sunk a clipper off of the coast of Anglesey, arriving from Melbourne to Liverpool, at the height of the Australian Gold Rush, a maritime disaster that led to the loss of four hundred and sixty off the Welsh coast, in a perilous convergence of severe wind speeds that took some 800 lives in 133 ships offshore of the British Isles–as huge waves broke anchor chains of multiple ships, and a famous clipper that ran ashore in the disaster off Anglesey–
–leading Robert Fitzroy to develop a national storm warning system, using the collation of coastal information in the earliest meteorological maps, in hopes to offer greater security in a national storm warning system from coastal observations. Fitzroy’s interest in meteorological prediction from coastal stations led him to ideate a National Storm Warning System, if the sense of a national need materialized that night before Halloween in 1859. by “imitating malignant spirits.” Fitzroy truest the collation of statistical information from charts to offered a basis to predict coastal weather, offering security at sea that the disaster at Anglesey demonstrated was a national as well as commercial need. The steam clipper that hit the shores offered a proof of purchase of safety on the English sea, to protect against loss of life and goods, if the systems of coastal alerts and lifeboat systems, later in place from 1868, and from 1861 issuing storm warnings, that sought to domesticate the sea,–if the Shipping Forecast was later recognized by many–including Seamus Heaney, no less–as a uniquely alluring disembodied poetry of siren-like effect: “Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:/Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux/ Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,/Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.” It also offered the unkown security of treating the ocean as a legible surface.
The sense of security of offshore travels to arctic oceans grew as the Shipping Forecast expanded to the Northern Atlantic, and gale warnings by telegraph stations grew to be telegraphed by the General Post form 1911, featuring a synopsis of meteorological readings from stations on the British Isles, subsequently reaching larger audiences as broadcast on long wave by the BBC from 1924.
John Emslie, British Isles and the Surrounding Seas (1851)
If the Shipping Forecast offered a repository of far-flung g information over the radio, a sort of precursor to global maps, and shipping intelligence offered a widely read feature of the popular press long, a sort of precursor to Google Maps, pillaged by novelists from Wilkie Collins to Bram Stoker to Robert Louis Stevenson, for its shipwrecks, Google Maps has increased the security of all oceanic regions as if they were known, and secure. The interest in a submersible that boasted the ability to descend into the submarine waters to the level of the Titanic provided a selling point of fascination for OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who offered to pilot millionaires to the bottom of the shoals where the Titanic rested, helped guarantee the rich repository, even if some of Rush’s former close friends have since suggested that the entrepreneur was in fact “designing a mousetrap for millionaires,” by which he knew he would “go out with the biggest bang in human history.” Yet the copious assurances of imperviousness to the elements have left a bitter taste of the hubris of modernity in one’s mouth, and recalled the terrifying sinking of the Titanic a hundred years after it tragically sunk to the ocean floor–and indeed arrived quite close to the liner’s final resting place.
Seabed Map Showing Proximity of the Titan to the HMS Titanic/RMS Titanic, Inc
The recent tragedy of the passengers on the submersible that imploded on Sunday, June 18, immediately killing killing all five crew members aboard the submersible named Titan is cast as a question of accident and negligence–eerily if not intentionally echoing the tragedy of RMS Titanic. It poses deeper questions of the geography of opportunity relate to recasting the underseas setting in a language of opportunity, a language of offshore exploration linked to the exploration of energy resources without regulation cast as a preserve for libertarian abundance offering, in Rush’s own words of 2015,”minerals, chemicals, biological–it is a vast, huge opportunity.” Registered offshore in the Bahamas, rather than with American agencies or the international agencies that assure safety standards for underseas voyages, it was mapped off the regulatory network or web, as fit the desire of its pilot, Stockton Rush, who believed regulations stifled innovation and enterprise, even if they are rooted in the collective knowledge of the maritime industry. If Titanic was technically tied to the Royal Mail Services–it carried some two hundred sacks of registered mail headed overseas with five mail clerks who perished in the sinking ship–the luxury liner was cast as a voyage in style, with a language of exclusivity for its unfortunate first class passengers the Titan emulated.
The geography of the offshore nurtured Rush’s dream as an ideal if highly toxic Petri dish. The dream of offshore abundance was intertwined with a an absence of all regulation in exploration–an image of free enterprise, not contained by government regulation or governmentally. Indeed, this set the stage for a new sort of exploration free from government intervention and oversight. It was born from the growth of the offshore immunity from legal oversight that is a recent creation mirroring the growth of offshore tax havens. Rush had consciously placed an underseas adventure industry offshore, outside of any governmental oversight. The OceanGate submersibles that set off from the Puget Sound, Caribbean waters, or Newfoundland, profited from having launch sites on the periphery of international waters. They were able to promise the low thresholds of government oversight, after all, that were demanded for Rush’s focus on a project of deep-sea diving. Indeed, such offshore platforms mirror the low regulations that allow minimal taxation int the world’s growing offshore jurisdictions to avoid taxes or regulatory oversight–regions that have, not coincidentally, appropriated the rhetoric of oceanic exploration–
–but for which there is a fairly predetermined map after all, a large part clustering off the areas where Rush’s company, OceanGate, was in fact based as a non-profit to evade regulations–the offshore islands of the Bahamas, recently come to light in the revelation of the Panama Papers.
Rush had actively promoted an “experimental” approach that was rooted offshore, outside state regulatory agencies, and out of anger with the unncessary “red tape” that he saw as obstructive on a market that many offshore companies–and offshore energy platforms–sought to exploit. For Rush, the offshore existed not only as a space to offer fantasy voyages for the super-rich who were not officially “passengers” at all, but “mission specialists” or complicit collaborators in a global fantasy, but promised a reader on the sort of safety regulations that, since the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic, had been widely adopted for travel.
As passengers of the luxury Titanic might indulge in the pleasure cruise of a transatlantic trip in elegance, seeing and being seen, passengers on the Titan would be able to see the same ship’s ruins, taking photos from a seven-inch thick plexiglass porthole doubling as an entry hatch into a regulation-free space that exists in the offshore world. Using metaphors of action television, Rush told CBS “the pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all,” dropping the names and technology of Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington, although the technologies of aerospace and space exploration were hardly transferrable to deep-sea stresses, though Rush did not seem to think the technology transfer problematic, even if he was going to play host to paying customers he promised to bring over 12,000 feet under sea–or over 2,100 fathoms–some two miles beneath sea level, and the submersive was promoted as able to descend nearly a full 13,000 feet.
The regulation-free space which Rush so desired and dreamed to push the edges of “science” in a friction-free manner was the space of globalization, if the deep dives were placed in international waters. Titanic tourisms was “a thing,” but was a creation of globalism, able to escape all regulations into the land of pure fantasy, following on Rush’s decision in the Mojave Desert in 2004 as he lost interested in commercial craft of space exploration and space tourism that “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore,” even if that dream was more of a hybrid of global capitalism and a television soundstage than knowledge or an actual scientific mission.
Despite the benefits of viewing undersea coral reefs, Rush was long attracted to reefs as a future site of prospecting, and indeed “exploration” became a sort of code-word for energy prospecting if not the evaluation of deep-sea offshore projects of petroleum production and extraction. (Some of the deepest sites of oil platforms are in the Gulf of Mexico, operating at a record-breaking 8,000 feet underseas; maximum depth of waters of the Gulf, one of the densest sites of federally least offshore sites of oil and gas extraction, and underseas offshore engineering, is estimated between 12,000 and 14,000 feet–or around the depth at which the Titanic, lying at about 12,500 feet would be an excellent proof of concept.)Yet how much of a proof of concept did the plans for Stockton Rush’s ventures into underseas travel suggest?
The growth of ultra-deep underseas oil production in the Gulf took off from around 2005, and a privately produced fleet of underseas submersibles would be imagined to be rented out to energy companies would would spare no expense for evading liabilities. But the story was maybe more convincing than the science that lay behind it. As much as the romances of Victor Hugo, the references to 1970s television that spun the Apollo 11 spaceflight into popular were the touchstones of Rush’s stock imagination–he cited as models of “exploring underwater frontiers” such stock aspirations like Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars–which James Cameron was hardly the first to situate underseas. But Rush located them in international waters, as if this increased the sense of adventure. The serendipitous intersection of international waters and entrepreneurship suggests his epiphany he wanted to be more like Capt. Kirk than a client of Jeff Bezos was rooted in a sense of himself not as Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but as an entrepreneur. Or perhaps his vision of the Enterprise’s mission was inextricable from an entrepreneurial streak. Underwater wrecks were not exactly “where no man had gone before,” but resurrected the mystique of discovery in an age when many find themselves bored, especially super-rich who searching for new grounds to prove and test themselves.
The intersection of international waters and entrepreneurial ideals fit the international idée fixe which so aptly intersected with the society of the spectacle, not to mention international collective fantasies, free from frontiers of the nation-state. He offered the super-rich a chance to join him in a rather stock fantasy, overdetermined with its own script, telling them that they would be guiding their own personal adventures, without a sense of being complicit in Rush’s own fantasy: “We don’t take tourists–we like to refer to them as explorers,” semantically clarifying, “the difference between an explorer and an adventurer is an explorer documents what he does, and an adventurer just goes, pounds their chest and tells their friends”–that border, for a self-described visionary, on pretty toxic narcissism.
Rush exploited his discovery of the scale of global enthrallment of the Titanic upon his discovery that the global currency of the name of the lost luxury liner had a global currency that was comparable only to ‘Coca Cola‘ and ‘God‘–posed a uniquely bankable business opportunity as much as a fantasy, or a fantasy that he could be pretty sure would sell. And offering a trip that OceanGate promoted as for the very same as first-class trans-Atlantic passage on the Titanic itself in 1912 adjusted for inflation, a nice historical touch that put you in a narrative of globalism–and in a global elite, the exclusivity of visiting the ocean liner’s wreck in the company of scientists and explorers affirmed your own status as an explorer, somewhere between Coca Cola and God.
1. The sunken craft Titanic was located forty years ago but only recently revealed in situ–let alone on the big screen and traveling shows. It has since assumed disproportionate size in the global media and mental imaginary. The depiction of the sunken ship’s elegance in the 1997 blockbuster film, Titanic, in opulent objects from its wreckage since its 1985 location, and in rare footage taken from submersibles have made it the object of desire and fascination, situated 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.
Yet we may have insufficiently appreciated how its situation in international waters encouraged unregulated exploration of the wreckage of the sort that Stockton Rush sought to pioneer.
Atlantic Productions/Magellan LTD
Suddenly, rather miraculously, it was able to be raised in one’s imagination to the tangibly visible. The underseas wreck had all of a sudden, however improbably, become a destination. And even in late June, after tragic implosion of the Titan submersible, the OceanGate website continued to offer a “thrilling and unique” and an opportunity to “intrepid travelers” to “follow in Jacques Cousteau’s footsteps and become an underwater explorer” by a trip that would allow you to “see with your own eyes . . . the iconic wreck that lies 380 miles offshore and 3,800 meters below the surface of the ocean.”
The odd combination of different units of measure and reference to a 1970s television star who regularly visited sunken treasure might be telling about the commitment to a serious scientific mission, rather than offering window-dressing to attract consumers. The rhetorical promotion of future planned trips to visit the Titanic wreckage scheduled for 2024 continued to promise a “thrilling and unique” as “your chance to step outside of everyday life and discovery something extraordinary” in late June, 2023, after the tragic implosion of the submersible, as if offering an opportunity to feel virtuous by being able “to help the scientific community.” What better object of desire could Stockton Rush possibly offer clients in waters free from national oversight?
Welcome to the unregulated world of the offshore aspirations. While the offshore waters of Newfoundland were most recently in the news during the assessment of offshore projects that require no federal oversight, in which a sleight of hand prepositional alchemy uses ‘offshore’ for by an absence of ‘oversight,’ they became the center of global attention as three nations triangulated rescue missions by U.S. Coast Gard ships’ sonar, Canadian military planes, marine buoys and other maritime vessels to the site of the disappearance. The International effort was not only to search in signs of the lost super-rich, but the mission engineered for offshore areas of energy prospecting that have become the new imperatives of coordinated international efforts. To be sure, this was a human tragedy. But it was also about the control over nature and preserving of underseas access.
Is there no coincidence that the tragedy of the Titan was a confirmation of the increased separation of two separate layers of economic life and of economic investment. The members of the underseas expedition were disarmingly confident, all too giddily confident, of the benefits of their abilities to escape constraints, even if that meant to open themselves to extreme risk. It can’t escape notice that the new parallel tragedies of the RMS Titanic and visit to its ruins by OceanGate occurred in ages of pronounced income inequality, and different eagerness to map relations of the economic elite to the world? The echo of markets of luxury transatlantic trips for the super-rich certainly cater to an economic elite: they mirror, unsurprisingly, how Thomas Picketty tracked the changing concentration of income in the top percentile–or income inequality. This is the very market Rush pitched the underseas voyages amidst rising rates of income inequality on both sides of the Atlantic–the homes of the British White Star Line that operated RMS Titanic and of OceanGate CEO.
The exploration of the underseas catered to a constituency quite familiar with the advantages of the offshore–a libertarian conceit of the super-wealthy far beyond Rush himself. The hubris of placing themselves in distinct markets of users outside of government regulations would have appealed and made sense to the British UAE-based tycoon Hamish Harding whose headquarters of an aircraft brockerage company is in Dubai and the Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, whose multinational conglomerate is headquartered in Karachi, who had invested broadly in fertilizers, petrochemicals, energy infrastructure and telecommunication infrastructure, focussing on mergers and acquisitions who lived in southwest London and whose father’s wealth the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers was revealed safely sequestered tax-free offshore in the British Virgin Islands. Were the not the very folks familiar with the advantages offered by the offshore that they were set to explore without a minimum of governmental oversight?
These figures were connoisseurs of the economic shell-games off the offshore. Picketty has reminded us that in recent years, the absurdly outsized share of income taken by the upper 1% has surpassed that of J.P. Morgan’s day, when the Titanic was selling first-class tickets to folks like John Jacob Astor– who notoriously assured his new eighteen year old bride of the ship’s safety as it sunk. And rising concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite for occasions of undue opulence–displays of wealth inequality in America on a global stage, as it were–that ships like the RMS Titanic offered. Were they not aware of the advantages of the lack of regulations in offshore regions, and advantages of geography of the location of Rush’s speculative investment in a new market for offshore exploration of extraction?
And while I had not often considered the specificity of Newfoundland in a global playing field, off whose waters the Titanic not only lay, but whose offshore Bay du Nord has been a field for oil speculation promoted as a new energy infrastructure of Canada–if not North America–waters in ongoing assessment for their use for energy markets–the large island of Newfoundland and Labrador, suddenly assumed new relation to the tragic disaster of the Titan submersible, which one might be tempted to ignore it as yet another unwarranted media attention to the lives of the super-rich. Perhaps as my wife was visiting the island with her mother, and it had assumed a geographic specificity in recent weeks, the delicate northern ocean environment seemed a striking site for the tragedy to gain intense global media attention as it became a focus of rescue operations whose maps I kept returning as if I were spinning them round in my mind. But while we think of the offshore as a site of oil prospecting and petroleum production, the absence of regulation over the same zones makes them especially active zones of underseas prospecting as well.
Planned Offshore Energy Markets Off Newfoundland
The calamitous loss we measured against the stopwatch of remaining oxygen remained for the six lost at sea–even as we feared the submersible exploded. It might be best mapped on a chart of international waters, and the absence of government oversight by agencies with whom Rush expressed angry impatience. (Rush had registered the experimental submersible in offshore harbors–the Bahamas, owned by a Bahamian entity, and securely offshore–to evade governmental oversight or safety constraints constraints, and targeted plunges in securely offshore areas.) The area in which it sunk was beyond the 200 mile limit of offshore exploration, raising immediate questions for journalists. Was financial safety at balance with the risk presented to paying customers willing to pay up front for a sneak peak of the fabled underseas liner, boasted to be impervious, that quite suddenly sunk to abyssal depths after hitting an unobserved iceberg?
RMS Titanic Underseas; June 2004 (NOAA/IFE/URI)
The fantasy of the revealing of the sunken luxury liner in all its intact splendor gained new legs for a global audience in Stockton Rush’s unique vision of independence–free from government restrictions and oversight. Rush traded in modern myths, taking inspiration from outer space films and underseas legends. The first footage OceanGate revealed in 2022 was no less than an advertisement for the trip, and in charging passengers the same prices of a first-class ticket on the RMS Titanic, adjusted for inflation, the big reveal of its ruin promised access to an imagined destination only fourteen years ago. Is there surprise that the OceanGate website continued to advertise “your chance to step outside of everyday life discover something extraordinary” on a unique “eight day expedition to dive to the iconic wreck” below the surface of the ocean to “intrepid travelers” even after the submersible had imploded? The exploration of underseas ecosystems on deep-ocean reefs that were long hidden from observers aside, the book of access to the unseen offshore ruins was OceanGate’s big reveal.
As we commemorate forbears for which he was named signing a document furiously objecting to extending “unwarrantable jurisdiction over us” in suspending local legislatures, plundering seas, and ravaging coasts, the pluck of his forebears contrasts to how Rush seemed determined to map his own company’s way beyond all territorial jurisdiction, foreign to his early modern ancestors. The recent mapping of the sunk liner on which 1500 had died by underwater submersibles meant that the group burial site would only be scanned by a private mapping company in its entirety, as Magellan LTD synthesized 700,000 images for a 3-D visualization last year that might compete with the 3-D remastering on the 25th anniversary re-release of a film of a “timeless” love story in one of the highest-grossing films ever–a costly triumph of cinematic technology whose budget doubled to an unprecedented $295 million, the size of a multi-year IMF loan to a small nation.
Was there not also a love story with the sunken liner, that seems to rise now in unimagined verisimilitude? The liner was a new object of desire in a world of limited thrills, and offered an exclusive access for the super-rich to a remaining promise of luxury of global scale. If the failure of the engineering feat of designing a ship impervious to the ocean promised a vertiginous access to an epitome of global luxury, the sunken was also an image of stalled globalism–a failed promises of globalism.
The disappearance of the ship that was deemed unsinkable, soon after its arrival off the shore of Newfoundland, is hard to capture, but the submersible’s disappearance seemed a terrible déja vu. The horror of the sudden shrinkage of the surplus of a global voyage to a single dot, sunk on the ocean floor, was perhaps what bound the two events. If the submersible managed by OceanGate was animated by a high-grossing film that concretized collective desire for the opulent setting as a vehicle for the super-rich that displacing attention to how its actual engineering was farless foolproof than assumed, undermining a hubris that reduced its high-paying passengers to their fates among flotsam and jetsam, flipping the narrative of engineering a site of floating luxury dominating nature–and promising to span the ocean, without sparing any luxury–that sunk.
Willy Stöwer, 1912
Recently, the offshore has emerged as a curiously unregulated space in the globalized world, defined outside sovereign claims. In the aftermath of global attention to a disaster that tempted fate and perhaps easily averted, the deep-sea dive of the Titan may have violated basic physics and wear and tear as it approached water pressure that rose by thousands of pounds per sq inch. Maps won’t reveal what went wrong. But some maps might help to grasp the scale of the tragedy. For the dive exploited a change in the mapping of national space, that helped to release the submersible from the very safety standards that the sinking of the RMS Titanic helped establish, by placing the liner in international waters, effectively releasing the dive to abyssal from government oversight, long opening it to bounty hunters, even as the United States Congress mandated–though it was outside national waters–that the liner’s ruins be untouched as an archeological site, on the advice of the oceanographer Robert Ballard, RMS Titanic Memorial Act as oceanographer Robert Ballard, who helped discover the wreck, offered his expert advise that it be left undisturbed underseas.
If the ship lay in international Watters, the US Congress invited NOAA to help to negotiate an international treaty, lest artifacts be pillaged. Over the fifteen years it took to negotiate the treaty–as a private salvage company that recovered a wine decanter in 1993 sought exclusive rights for its filming. (The private Titanic Ventures Limited Partnership also sought exclusive rights to its underseas exploration.) Visits of unmanned submersibles to the ruins of the Titanic were the stock trade of the High Seas–piracy–pilfering jewels, perfume vials, jewelry or sheet music. When by 2012, a virtual sonar tourist map to the wreck had emerged in the public domain, however–even if the underseas wreck lay in international waters, outside national jurisdiction, per Admiralty law–
–as if to advertise its prospecting, inviting fantasies based on the 1997 global hit film, raising hopes to visiting the elusive ship, even without disturbing the archeological remains. The new debris field that is all that remains of the carbon fibre nose of the submersible only expands that archeological field in an uncanny SONAR mosaic of the seabed, taken by the Salvage Company, less than a third of a mile from the sunken steamship’s steel-plated hull.
2. The lamination of several mapping regimes might be reviewed to place Titanic on legal footing. In the post-territorial regimes of the 1970s, the shifting spatiality of regimes of sovereignty had led to claiming “national waters” and Exclusive Economic Zones–the United States had claimed territory over open waters of two hundred nautical miles in 1982, or two hundred and thirty actual miles–after the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea–UNICLOS–determined that sovereign jurisdiction expanded to the waters of coastal states, which claimed both rights to natural resources, and, since 1994, sovereign limits on the High Seas.
Exclusive Economic Zones
Lying off the coast of Canada by 400 nautical miles, the liner was firmly placed in international seas. Can we untangle the intersection of laws that created and fostered the planning of the voyage to visit Titanic in June, 2023?
The economic conventions were principally designed to limit disputes over marine resources, and their management, including the sea floor. But these seams of sovereignty were a reordering of the territorial claim of the laws that loosened Stockton Rush from liability, as much as the waivers that his clients signed. The maritime continental margin lies adjacent to territorial waters, and often includes the continental shelf, as the shelf off which the wreck of the Titanic lies in a sandy region, off of the continental shelf, just a hundred miles off of southeastern Newfoundland, whose coastal lighthouses found the news sent by ship passengers, on an otherwise noneventful telegraph, interrupted by an urgent SOS–“Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking.” The event realized the global prominence of lighthouse earlier imagined by mid-nineteenth century by the Vice-President of the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, as lying–in a wonderful early figure of globalism–directly on “the point on the great highway of nations, towards which every mariner bound on either the eastern or western voyage, between Europe and America, looks as to a place of departure, . . .”
Map of the Submarine Telegraph between Europe and America, 1854
Map of the Submarine Telegraph between Europe and America, 1857/Leventhal Map Collection, Boston Library
The port of St. Johns (shown in the inset) became a certain hub of Atlantic news. Before the second underseas cable of 1866, however, I learned when my wife visited Newfoundland, transatlantic steamships regularly dropped European newspapers, rolled in air-tight tubes, passing the port; the local AP office collected summaries for telegraphing European news to North America long before the Titanic sunk, when the latest European news was identified by the “via Cape Race” byline, read from the European papers procured from the bottle thrown from newly arriving steamships.
When the Telegraph Company Vice President promoted the place of the lighthouse as a global edge, he described it “in the line of the great circle-sailing, between the ports of Liverpool, London, and Havre, on the one side of the Atlantic; and Boston, New York, and Philadelphia on the other.” The byline gained global fame in a new era of globalism of the Telegraph, however, by coordinating rescue operations of the site of massive tragedy, and telegraphic news of the disaster that quickly absorbed global attention, promoting the immediate news of the disaster of unexpected scale to global news markets. Only obscured by the rise of the second transatlantic cable lain in the early 1860s, the Titanic elevated the AP office long dependent on the overseas transportation of newspapers tightly wrapped in watertight vials thrown from passing ships–rather than transmitted by telegraph or online–into its nearby ocean waters to be recuperated by a dedicated AP dinghy.
Henry David Thoreau chided telegraphers’ ambitious hopes two years just before the laying of the second submarine line, argued that extreme eagerness “to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new” in his 1854 classic of living “in the woods” as unwarranted–“perchance,” Thoreau rather caustically observed from the banks of Walden Pond, “the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Years before the Titanic, Thoreau feared recent eagerness “to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas” obscured the possibility that “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” While he never imagined electrifying demand for global interest or advent of global news, let alone from abyssal depths, the global news ecosystem changed immediately, however, as a sentence arrived by wire from Cape Race–“Reported Titanic struck iceberg“–the byline “CAPE RACE, Newfoundland” announced immediate assistance–“We are sinking fast passengers put on boats“–that the White Star Line steamship heralded as unsinkable required. “We have struck and iceberg=sinking fast=come to our assistance=Position Lat. 41 46N = LON 51.14 W” they telgraphed via Western Union with supreme assurance in the smooth geodetic surface of the globe.
The giddy globalism that the telegraph offered as a new means of communication that connected individual lives in its new network was an object of fascination for Henry James, who used the telegraph himself and was fascinated by its social ties as a new landscape of contingency, whose network James appreciated as a new landscape that afforded the agent a new order “winged intelligence” from messages sent, at curious odds with the close physical confines of her office, in James’ elegant novella In the Cage (1898; American ed., 1908): the telegraphist is a sort of novelist, assembling from fragmented messages a dizzying “panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour and accompanied with wondrous world-music,” whose medium draws her “more and more into the world of whiffs and glimpses” that stretch across the globe, without ever leaving London for months.
James’ novella of fin de siècle excess and the unremitting expenditures on urgently telegraphed messages that reveal the secret lives of their encounters on holidays or “just off the decks” of luxury yachts. “She read into the immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end,” entranced by the prodigious surplus of propositions sent by telegraph as if tethered to them, propelled “through a thousand ups and downs and a thousand pangs and indifferences,”–in the “shuffling herd that passed before her by far the greater part only passed,” “swam straight away, lost themselves in the bottomless common,” if an appreciable few stayed in her mind as they coursed along the telegraph wires above the ground, and removed from her own circumstances.
Gleaning fragments of sent telegraphs while trapped in her cage seems a modern condition. James dwelled on how the “queer extension of her experience” offered the telegraph operator a double-life. As telegraph wires stretched across the surface of the world, as at a remove from the world, and new relation to its economic networis she has a removed relation, reading information on rooms at hotels, furnished rooms, travel dates for sailing, trains, or meeting hours “for the most part prosaic and course,” as a view “more and more into the world of whiffs and glimpses,” entertaining interpretations, as “extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins” only “twisted the knife in her vitals”–leaving her shocked at the expenditures of attention on trifling communications she reads “stories and meanings without end,” living vicariously on messages sent from the “decks of steamers that conveyed them” that “brought into her stuffy corner as straight a whiff of the Alpine meadow and Scotch moors as she might hope to inhale.” Is this not an anticipation of social media, at the London exchange office of several telegraph lines?
In this world of “winged intelligence,” the news that tripped from telegraph wires in collision of the RMS Titanic fell from telegraph wires in Cape Race four years after American publication of James’ novella, but indelibly fell to the newspaper of record’s front page with rather haunting clarity. The newspaper of record made its name reporting how few passengers survived the transatlantic liner’s first fatal crossing. While the shipping firm White Star denied AP reports, letting London headlines overoptimistically assert no loss of lives in a ship after it telegraphed its arrival. Its captain issued distress missives to White Star Lines in London–“WE HAVE STRUCK AN ICEERG = SINKING FAST = COME TO OUR ASSISTANCE,” “SOS SOS We are sinking fast passengers being put on boats”–while at sea, that would spread as the basis for global news of the disaster.
The headline distilled a collapse of the promise of modernity: Titanic was global news, giving new sense to ‘breaking’ news, without need for a map. The lede announcing the loss of life and few survivors as the ship plunged to the ocean’s bottom dramatically noted hopes of finding the “noted names” in the North Atlantic receded even as the area of the high seas continued to be searched as the world processed leaving 1250 dead at sea.
The Captain–E.J. Smith–staring out beside a “Partial List of the Saved” was drowned by the lost liner’s tragic fate. It is a sad reminder that the iceberg that the large vessel hit was not seen by its crew, and that he, as well as the ship, will never be seen again–that “Partial List of the Saved” puts on display the biblical scale of the disaster, by which drowned and saved were parsed by tragic fate from which one was reminded that one could not be saved by divine prayer, as “I am sinking, . . . and my feet are slipping” (Psalms 69: 1), but no intervention by prayer might be expected.
3. If the sad news of the Titanic in global news media may have predetermined attention to the tragic loss of the OceanGate submersible, as much as prefigured it, the map of the ship’s collision with an iceberg or the wreck’s location was not the major story. The operative map deserving centrality in the outpouring of news about the submersible was not the location of the wreck, but of its place and its launching in the pseudo-safety of international waters, safe from regulations but open to multiplied risks. If the location of the wreckage was long-unknown–only by 1985 was an unmanned vehicle towed on the ocean’s floor at the end of miles and miles of coaxial cable by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), to provide the first real-time images of the sunken liner, a turning point after which it exercised great gravitational pull on explorers. Before the long two days that the lost submersible dominated global news, its location unknown, the wreck was long unknown, located by SONAR mapping only in 1959 mapping on the edge of a marine ravine, after numerous unsuccessful attempts; but the attention turned to the location in international waters far more than its location on the seafloor.
SONAR imagery Recreate the First Underseas Archeological Mapping of Titanic on Ocean Floor/Archaeology/ courtesy Waitt Institute, Robert Sitrik
The discovery of the ruins of the RMS Titanic lay at the intersection of laminated mapping technologies and regimes–or of mapping regimes, as much as technologies. Stockton Ruch was a good salesman in promoting the routes of visiting the sunken liner “up close and personal”–
For the OceanGate company of exploration, however, it was far more significant that the wreck lay in something of a “sweet spot”–removed from mandated safety rules for passenger vessels, national law, or sovereign claims, were far more important than maps of the wreckage’s undersea location. (Yet one has to doubt, however, this might prompt reconsidering ocean-safety regulations.). Yet the tragedy of the submersible will have little effect, one can be sure, on the plans to start jump starting Newfoundland’s economy, by partnering with offshore deepwater oil exploration for gas and oil deposits in the Bay du Nord, lured by promises of extracting a billion of barrels of crude from the deep seabed, some up to a third of the depths at which the Titanic rests. The deep-sea drilling project east of Newfoundland where four offshore oil and gas projects operate have gained increased environmental warnings, but Canada’s government is actively promoting as an environmentally conscious activity by “industry leading” low emissions–i.e., without reliance on continuous flaring; carbon efficient in its recovery of gas and emissions; part of a transition to a low carbon economy–although the danger of an oil spill to environmentally sensitive regions would be disastrous. Was the recovery of the Titan a massive proof of concept for the safety of the underwater drilling projects already underway, communicating a sense of security about the speculation in offshore regions dependent on weakening government oversight over the offshore?
GPS Location of the Wreckage of the Titanic/Google Maps
The same waters are pushed for as “Canada’s Future.” Indeed, the promotion of oil investigation in international waters off the coast of Newfoundland were long defined as central to Atlantic offshore production and national energy infrastructure. The centrality of the region derives from it lying, paradoxically, outside the national waters, with an added bonus of low oversight and exemption from paying royalties to International Seabed Authority in the first five years of its production. But the very nature of the unmonitored and unregulated offshore makes it a potential boom region for energy speculation, a space for free exercise of libertarian fantasies able to black-box or insulate entrepreneurial hopes outside of regulatory agencies. For guys like Rush, committed to there opening of new frontiers of economic power, or Oison Fanning, the Irish energy industry executive who was a mission specialist for OceanGate, “OceanGate” was opening up not only “a new era of exploration” but unlocking frontiers of being able to exploit hidden seabed petroleum reserves.
While Stockton Rush’s ties to the oil industry are usually cast as familial, exploration of the Titanic was the prototype and model, before the tragic implosion of the submersible craft on its descent, to attract interest of oil and gas companies across the Americas to speculating in offshore energy markets with submersibles–the true target audience of his operations, and of the profitability of his enterprise. The very same “oil and gas companies” who were the major audiences for daredevil stunt for paying “explorers” and “adventurers” who fulfilled the need to proof of concept for new tools—“But oil and gas [companies] don’t take new technology. They want it proven, they want it out there.” A dive to the abyssal depths to explore the Titanic at first hand with a bunch of “geeks” and super-rich, if irresponsible, was a perfect promotional vehicle to attract investment to his manned sub, despite its potential dangers.
Offshore Basins in North Sea off Newfoundland Leased for Oil Exploration, 2018
Welcome to the uncertain waters of the offshore. While the ruins of the Titanic were hardly predetermined as the destination of OceanGate expeditions, the company showcased visits to the Andrea Doria off of the Nantucket coast, just beyond the continental shelf, the Greater Farallones islands in a National Marine Sanctuary in international waters off of San Francisco, deep sea corror Georgia Basin of the Puget Sound, a logic of libertarianism pushed OceanGate to international waters of the North Atlantic. The benefits of being offshore were clear to Rush, and have long been discussed as critical to the business model of operating a venture pushed by private industry, without government oversight or restrictions and “red tape.”
These were offshore spaces lying safely outside codes of governance. For Stockton Rush, the secret was to “operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Rush made sure that he was able to escape government regulatory bodies, and certifying agencies–deemed “over-the-top in their rules and regulations,” avoiding regulations as the Passenger Vessel Safety Act (1993) and circumventing so much “regulatory red tape” he rued as a restraint on private industry that held back its commercial development to ensure that “it hasn’t innovated or grown.” Rush was combatively caustic about government regulations, and persistently so: “they have all these regulations,” he railed against codes of conduct and safety regulations as if they were bothersome gnats, even as he assured the craft “obscenely safe” for repeated deep-sea dives. RUsh guaranteed the safety of his craft despite 2016 concerns of having a “seaworthy ship” and possible compromise to its hulldue to “cycle fatigue” from continued deep sea excursions, or concerns from the ability to stay in contact with a mothership above sea to its steering mechanism. Absence of government oversight was an increasing necessity for Rush’s promotion of continued deep sea dives.
4. But the Titanic was a lodestone of the project if not the key to its profitability and secret sauce–the sole underseas destination with global name-recognition, even if the hubris of the Titanic, whose captain and crew ignored warning signs about icebergs, in a ship that was proclaimed to sail itself the latest addition to the White Star fleet, promoted as “the largest and safest steamer in the world” and “epitome of security.” The ship was navigated without visual aids or binoculars, before its first transatlantic voyage hit an iceberg, even if it was eulogized as an iceberg that “no mortal eye could see/the intimate welding of their later history,” as ship met iceberg, sinking the unsinkable RMS Titanic “in a solitude of the sea/deep from human vanity and the Pride of Life that planned her.” Now that the Titanic is joined by the Titan on the abyssal depths, mapped by composites of SONAR, but far removed from sight at 2,000 fathoms, resurrected to become part of a visual field that one could finally master as subject to the appetite of the eye, fulfilling a desire and demand to “see” that Rush sought to offer unproblematically to all his paying customers who could afford it, arresting the viewer by promising satisfaction of making visible the long invisible craft.
If the Titanic was endangered by cost-cutting operations from the brittle plates of its steel hull that left its air chambers vulnerable to expeditiously if hastily over-ridden safety precautions, the dramatic tension between the iceberg and poorly riveted steel plates embedded the precarious nature of life in the relation of man and the elements: as it spooled out as a drama of global melancholy–not only were several survivors of the voyage enlisted in an early feature film of months after the disaster, and the author Hardy wrote an elegiac poem, cited above, a poem whose proceeds went to survivors; songs were quickly composed to come to terms to process the tragedy of so many lives lost, and true global scale of the disaster that was far more than a national tragedy, in a bizarre attempt of the need for transcendence: in one arresting venue for the transmutation of the tragedy, one cannot but be struck by a Yiddish song of the Titanic’s disaster that cast it as a “khurban.” For the somewhat grandiose use of a Biblical Hebrew loan-word originally reserved for destruction of the Temple of Solomon to the global scale of the maritime disaster may seem a cruel joke of human history. If the reduction of lives in the steamships’ striking an unseen floating iceberg inverted the traditional subject of songs about the drama of of immigration to elevate the Titanic to a global moment of destruction–as a historical turning point whose dimensions demand contemplation too immense for words.
Epitomized by the tragedy of two affluent Jewish passengers who had stoutly refused to board rescue boats, Isidore and Ida Straus, a former Congressman and co-owner of Macy’s and his wife. Isidor valiantly refused to board rescue boats given his age, prompting his wife to cite in her final words Ruth I: 16-7 as she rejoined her husband on the sinking ship that had hit the huge iceberg in an act of sacrifice. Their sad tragedy concluded a trip that had promised to include live entertainment and theatrical spectacles–as a rewriting of theater–reducing human life to vain attempts to save the drowning–and fragility of life–if the angel that places a wreath on the heads of the departed as she emerged from the iceberg was, in a sense, the Angle of History, being blown backward from the Chorban of the Holocaust, and the later half of the twentieth century–the cultural treasure of the Titanic being transformed to so much wreckage lying at its feet a sign of the wreckage that would continue to accumulate there, per Walter Benjamin, over the coming century.
Churbon Titanik, oder Der naser Keiverps, Library of Congress
Is the sinking of the ship the first ruinous disaster witnessed by Benjamin’s Angel of History? The term Chorban condensed the drama of global history to one point–the point where the ship sunk–in ways that oddly anticipate the use of the Yiddish word for the English Holocaust or Hebrew Shoah, as the destruction of the greatest magnitude, that the Angel of History solemnly wordlessly attends. The notion of a Chorban which in its magnitude exceeds and dwarfs all preceding historical events lead the term to be applied to World War I, the magnitude that may refer to the size of the liner, if seems evoked as commensurate with the Destruction of the Second Temple (70-71 CE) or razing of Jerusalem (135 CE)–‘Alas for us! The place which atoned for the sins of all the people Israel lies in ruins!’ bemoaned Rabbi Yehoshua before the temple’s ruins, pleaing for divine mercy–the global consequence the Angel solemnly witnessed She was on the surface, of course, solemnly celebrating the dedication of the pair last seen embracing beneath waves breaking on its decks.
The tragic scenario stood at odds with any hope of maintaining the calm equilibrium of devotion of Isidore and Ida Strauss, but condensed the drama of catastrophe in the resolute calmness of the couple before an unprecedented collective global disaster, and entry of the Jewish people into a new era of distress, in the minds of its Yiddish-speaking audience. The liner’s steel-plated stern hull rose as its prow’s watertight air compartments were breached, leading the ship to split in two; as it was buffeted by the waves, global attention focussed not only on the tragic loss of the couple at sea, whose enduring love–and anticipating the 1997 film in which the aging couple were recognizably included with small dramatic roles–was a microcosm of the global tragedy on the high seas, as passengers rappelled off the boat’s deck on ropes to seek safety on rescue boats.
The song spun the love story on the sunken the iconic liner as a sad tragedy, and tragic conclusion of a pleasure trip of musical amusements: Ida staunchly refused rescue boats to join her husband on deck, duly quoting from memory–“Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge.” As amusement turned to tragedy in the sad song, the Hebrew loan word of cataclysm– חורבן–must in 1912 have been intensely cataclysmic to immigrants escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe; from 1881 to 1914, two million Yiddish-speaking Jewish migrants sailed to America–a tenth of transatlantic migrants; in the great migration a decade before World War I, over a million Jews had arrived, if at a considerable social distance from the passengers on the Titanic, who did not speak or know Yiddish. The Yiddish language was far form Ida and Isidore’s lives,Yiddish song inescapably punctured dreams of transatlantic immigration, tragically of disrupted passage for Americanized second-generation German Jews on a luxury liner removed from Hebrew Immigration Aid Societies–or the trips offered on the Red Star Line from Antwerp, unlike the White Star Line’s RMS Titanic.
דער עמיגראנט [Der Emigrant], No. 142 (Warsaw 1923), Advertisement for Red Star Line
But the image and promise of transatlantic travel–the Strauses famously boarded the ship at the last minute, was an option from returning from vacationing on the French Riviera. But their trip echoed the figure of the Red Star Lines steamships promising smooth immigration from Antwerp to the New World to New York, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina or elsewhere in a mythic “America.” (The ad in the Polish newspaper The Immigrant derived form the poster designed by Henri Cassiers in 1899.)
Henri Cassiers, Postcard Promising Quick Transatlantic Passage on Red Star Line (1905)
The ghosts of Ida and Isidore still preside the North Atlantic seas, and transatlantic travel, disrupting a peaceful trip. German literary critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger felt the liner’s sinking was a global tragedy a failed projects of modernity–“The Titanic, pertaining to the colossal and gigantic, sought to enfeeble the sea, but ended-up being torn apart by the shifting packs of icebergs, like ghostly symbols“–prefiguring technologies of global war and genocide. The song of the Yiddish stage had already cast the ocean disaster as a חורבן, a premonition of disaster presided over by the ghosts of two virtuous German Jews, Ida and Isidora Straus. Their deaths punctured multiple dreams of New World assimilation as the paragon of assimilation brought down in the North Atlantic by tragic fate. After a private funeral presided over by a Rabbi performing the “Hebrew ritual” at their home, a public civic ritual of mourning in was attended by thousands in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Andrew Carnegie in attendance. The shock propelled Isidore’s brother, Nathan, who only avoided setting sail with them due to injury, to devote himself to philanthropic in Palestine, helping found Hebrew University in 1918 in Jerusalem with Judah Magnes.
The shadows of their death, ghosts presiding over the sinking steamship cast in 1912, were long. It was no doubt hardly coincidence their great-great-grand-daughter, Wendy Rush, directed communications for OceanGate and is widow of Stockton Rush. The luster of the family’s deeply personal association to Titanic was never exploited by OceanGate, but a deeply personal tie to the tragedy, and to those who lost their lives at sea.
5. There was no redemption in voyaging underwater to view the sunken liner over a century later. But what lay at the ocean floor was sacralized as a lodestone of modernity, if not touchstone of globalism’s failure and the rupture of the smoothness of transatlantic travel. Inspiring the attention and curiosity of the super-rich, and a global icon of the unknown, the voyage was in ways a new extreme sport that attracted eager interest: more had traveled in space than to the Titanic. Rush’s project and fantasy indeed hinged on escapism, predicated on escape from national oversight, with little echo of migration, but went beyond personal vanity, if its voyage in international waters seems almost planned.
International waters allowed Rush’s plans to transport paying passengers to an abyssal depths disdained systems of supervision and safety controls, in the full freedom from oversight outside national waters, but offered a form of time-travel, rewriting of a fantasy of globalization, beyond borders and free from sovereign control.
Map Courtesy OceanGate
The offshore destination in international waters was a site of global tourism, and the most famous instance of tourism on the High Seas. The Titanic could have fallen in far deeper waters near the Northwest Atlantic Mid-Ocean Canyon, but the new technology of tourism above the sandy seafloor where the ocean liner, itself an unregulated enterprise of an earlier era, promised adventure with class. For luxury expeditions to a luxury liner that had sunk was, in essence, was a tourist fantasy of a final frontier, on a privately-owned sub, piloting beyond the frontiers of pesky government agencies. Bemoaning regulations as a restraint on innovation, with passenger safety prioritized over adventure, Rush dreamed of finding, potentially, massive underseas oil reserves, chemicals, and even metals across the United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone, but deduced to pioneer where the money was, “participatory” adventure travel since that’s where the money was, making multiple precipitous descents to greater and greater depths, until it was able to promise fantasy travel not to outer space, but 12,500 feet down, to the set of a movie, long before the 1997 film.
The intersection of international waters and the underwater spectacle that one recognized from the James Cameron film would have offered a field day for theorists of hyperreality, as a vertiginous encounter with the often filmed sunken ship, did the voyage to the shipwreck not so tragically end in unnecessary deaths.
The international idée fixe intersected with the society of the spectacle, clothed in science. The filmic qualities long tied to the Titanic were only reinforced by 1997 James Cameron film, which gave global appeal to an escapist fantastic voyage of discovery, and elusive object of desire. Early projects of an aluminum submersible visiting the Titanic’s wreck had been earlier proposed as a joint venture of National Geographic and Walt Disney, in 1978, which proved too costly seems to have introduced the notion into popular scientific imagination tied to selling of fantasies; by 1980, a Texas oilman roped in two universities–Columbia University and the Scripps Oceanographic Institute–as consultants for a project for which Orson Welles was to narrate documentary, and William Morris Agency sell media rights. The 1992 voyage into the ship brought an IMAX film narrated by Leonard Nimoy to cross a final frontier; pop archeological interest in the site melded with the spectacle of raising twenty tons of its hull Las Vegas-style, with sitcom celebrities on a nearby ship. But before GPS integrated satellite photography and SONAR data, few ever imagined Titanic could be explored by anyone able to visit the abyssal depths, let alone photographed or explored as an archaeological site. OceanGate headily promoted access to “the Titanic as never seen before” for “explorers” able to be shared on Instagram. The firm beguilingly promised visuals of an underseas spectacle up-close and personal, paying customers able to photograph the sunken hull at first hand, hinting that they might themselves gain status by posting its image on Instagram.
OceanGate
To be sure, this was, in a sense, science: an exploration, worthy of William Shatner, of the “final frontier” in underseas life, many individual explorers–not only Rush–had employed cutting edge oceanographers like Kathleen Crane to explore the underseas, as IMAX and individual explorers encouraged folks to try their hand at oceanographic exploration, who seek funding from IMAX as funds from the National Science Foundation dried up. But it was also simulation. Was the prospect so slippery as to be tied to oil “exploration,” a euphemism for seabed extraction, and ready wealth generation? The oceanographer Crane has reminded us that we might take measure of the current nomination of a woman to lead the United States Navy in the Biden administration that as late as the 1990s, women weren’t allowed on Navy submarines in the Arctic–even those working on NSF operations–making IMAX a more attractive patron indeed, or, for the right sum, oil businesses interested in mapping new wells. This was a project that Rush was more than onboard.
But as much as mapping the location of the lost wreck, in an underwater vessel at $250,000 a pop, beating the regulations was perhaps the real important map Stockton Rush had in mind, even as he boasted in promotional materials of the pseudo-accuracy with which he might chart the location of the lost luxury liner, as if to suck fellow-explorers into his own fantasy. As the RMS Titanic met global news in ways that its owners never imagined, the tragedy suggested an unimaginable: yet the seabed mapping operations immediately enlisted to locate the disappeared submersible hardly capture the new geography that led the submersible to go missing that should never have occurred.
This was a voyage of offshore exploration that could only happen offshore. And Rush promoted fantasies, taking paying passengers, since 2009, to famous underseas wrecks– the Andrea Doria and SS Governor— in offshore marine reserves, with some lip service to a rhetoric of scientific discovery, as promising a wealth of information still hidden in the Titanic, for fellow-explorers who joined Rush on a mission-driven descent he would pilot. (Was it a coincidence that the steering mechanism for the underseas carbon fiber submersible OceanGate pioneered were steered by a PlayStation controller of the sort used in video games, let alone the rewired Logitech G Wireless Gamepad F710, a third-party gaming console Rush used on a tour of the submersible a year ago?)
Perhaps the ability to steer the submersible by a console by a PlayStation console contributed to a sense of wild self-assurance that this was not a dangerous mission, after all, even if OceanGate mandated realease forms. Rush believed regulations stifled American innovation, professing a passionate libertarian faith in the smooth playing field of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, and placed a premium on innovation and “breaking things,” even if that meant deploying only in international waters where the Titanic had encountered an iceberg and sunk, beyond the reach of any governing body, off the United States continental shelf. If the luxury cruise ship was itself an early illustration of global networks, and the illusion of smooth sailing across the Atlantic for the super-rich, the global sensation of the 1998 film provided a vision of a utopia far beyond capitalist markets–25 million pirated Chinese video copies alone–the ship was itself located is a new space of globalization, outside of the boundaries of national law and restrictive government oversight.
Of course, the international nature of the story of underseas rescue operations was its own global sensation, spanning news networks and filling space in a time of considerable. The news media was absorbed by the fact that something would be off the map, united by our mapping technologies, as chirons focussed on the remaining oxygen of the Titan, and relatives of its trapped passengers scanned the ocean surface for signs of possible survival, and a rescue mission of international scope–US and Canadian Coast Guards–assembled to locate the missing submersible, holding out hope before its forty hours of oxygen were exhausted. If the search mission approximated a military operation, from British aircraft, the French remotely operated vessels, and searches by companies dedicated to mapping the seabed, in hopes for something other than catastrophic loss. RIP, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, H.P. Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush.
To be sure, the loss of the Titan was an attempt to resurrect the daring that was promised with the RMS Titanic–a luxury voyage of an exclusive ocean liner–save for those below deck–that would charge what it billed as the original price first-class passengers paid, whose public interest may have reflected the amazing willingness of those who didn’t have to face risks of death readily doing so at exorbitant prices to imagine themselves at the center of a global spectacle and myth. As its pilot and CEO, and Stockton Rush surely wanted to scale the heights of myth, realizing a new model of underseas tourism and exploration.
There was something disconcerting of how we have come to map underseas destinations outside of the law and governance, and outside of governmental oversight. It is a way of remapping the abyssal depths as unknown, as the edges of our nautical maps are not shores, but rather maps of nautical governance–a far cry from the emergence of the Atlantic as the ocean battlefront of World War II remapped the ocean as a grid, where everything was known: the story of the Titanic’s wreckage was, in fact, the story of the unmappable and the unveiling of the underseas monument most difficult to access. It was off St. Johns, known as “Iceberg Alley,” where hundreds of icebergs break off of Greenland’s coast, from small bergs to colossal structures, though the station was a major naval base to monitor the oceanic space in World War II.
The flat surfaces of those wartime maps concealed dangers–not only hidden icebergs–but encouraged the very fundable nature of exact locations that may have detracted attention from the huge risks of deep sea exploration without adequate precautions–confined as they were to the surfaces of oceans, in the war of ocean domination carried out by submarines and air flights that led the US Army to adopt the Universal Transverse Mercator openly after the war’s end in 1947 to synchronize land, sea, and air.
Gridded Maritime Chart of Atlantic (1941)/Marine Quadratkarte Nr. 1870 G (Klein) Nord-Atlantischer Ozean, Kartengruppe
In the bitterly contested strategic theater of the North Atlantic, maps issued overly optimistic assurances War Services provided commercial ships via the Serial Map Service of full air coverage for overseas trade. The Service assured protection of seacraft by forces stationed at St. Johns–as it happens, quite near the Cape Race lighthouse that first received the SOS from the Titanic in the southern tip of Newfoundland, and were news would have been telegraphed to England of the ship’s arrival across the Atlantic–in a new image of globalism. America had leased the base in war, when Newfoundland was under British sovereignty, to extend an Ocean Battlefront to the North Atlantic, as the practical way to extend guarantees of protection over the high seas on the ocean battlefront. Rather than map the ocean a gridded battlefront, overlapping areas of aerial coverage to protect Atlantic shipping routes from air-fire across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Ocean Battlefront. Serial Map Service (July, 1941)
These maps of course only describe the surface of oceans, but raise questions of the real dangers of those areas we now describe as offshore, as much as the dangers to ships on the surface of the sea. And of the actual risks about security that still exist in safely navigating truly dangerous waters.
Musings on Maps 